Vortex lattices in Bose-Einstein condensates: from the Thomas-Fermi to the lowest Landau level regime

We investigate minimal energy solutions with vortices for an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate in a rotating trap. The atoms are strongly confined along the axis of rotation z, leading to an effective 2D situation in the x-y plane. We first use a simple numerical algorithm converging to local minima of energy. Inspired by the numerical results we present a variational Ansatz in the regime where the interaction energy per particle is stronger than the quantum of vibration i...

We study the dynamics of vortex lattice formation of a rotating trapped Bose-Einstein condensate by numerically solving the two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and find that the condensate undergoes elliptic deformation, followed by unstable surface-mode excitations before forming a quantized vortex lattice. The origin of the peculiar surface-mode excitations is identified to be phase fluctuations at the low-density surface regime. The obtained dependence of a distorti...

Excitation spectroscopy of vortex lattices in rotating Bose-Einstein condensates is described. We numerically obtain the Bogoliubov-deGenne quasiparticle excitations for a broad range of energies and analyze them in the context of the complex dynamics of the system. Our work is carried out in a regime in which standard hydrodynamic assumptions do not hold, and includes features not readily contained within existing treatments.

We study system of large number of singly quantized vortices in a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate. Analogous to the Meissner effect in superconductors, we show that the vector potential due to the external rotational field can be tuned to cancel the vector potential due to the Magnus field, resulting in a zero average angular momentum and a shear modulus of the vortex lattice. The vortex lattice state exhibits two states, namely, an elastic state and a plastic state. A clea...

We study a rapidly rotating Bose-Einstein condensate confined to a finite trap in the framework of two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii theory in the strong coupling (Thomas-Fermi) limit. Denoting the coupling parameter by $1/\eps^2$ and the rotational velocity by $\Omega$, we evaluate exactly the next to leading order contribution to the ground state energy in the parameter regime $|\log\eps|\ll \Omega\ll 1/(\eps^2|\log\eps|)$ with $\eps\to 0$. While the TF energy includes only ...

We develop an approach for calculating stationary states of rotating Bose-Einstein condensates in harmonic traps which is applicable for arbitrary ratios of the rotation frequency to the transverse frequency of the trap $\omega_{\perp}$. Assuming the number of vortices to be large, we write the condensate wave function as the product of a function that describes the structure of individual vortices times an envelope function, varying slowly on the scale of the vortex spacing....

We study the vortex lattices in a Bose-Einstein Condensate in a rotating anisotropic harmonic trap. We first investigate the single particle wavefunctions obtained by the exact solution of the problem and give simple expressions for these wavefunctions in the small anisotropy limit. Depending on the strength of the interactions, a few or a large number of vortices can be formed. In the limit of many vortices, we calculate the density profile of the cloud and show that the vor...

We found an analytical solution for the vortex structure in a rapidly rotating trapped Bose-Einstein condensate in the lowest Landau level approximation. This solution is exact in the limit of a large number of vortices and is obtained for the case of anisotropic harmonic potential. For the case of symmetric harmonic trap when the rotation frequency is equal to the trapping frequency, the solution coincides with the Abrikosov triangle vortex lattice in type-II superconductors...

We study numerically the vortex-lattice formation in a rapidly rotating uniform quasi-two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a box trap. We consider two types of boxes: square and circle. In a square-shaped 2D box trap, when the number of generated vortices is the square of an integer, the vortices are found to be arranged in a perfect square lattice, although deviations near the center are found when the number of generated vortices is arbitrary. In case of a circ...

We present a mean-field theory numerical study of Tkachenko waves of a vortex lattice in trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condenstates. Our results show remarkable qualitative and quantitative agreement with recent experiments at JILA. We extend our calculations beyond the conditions of the experiment, probing deeper into the incompressible regime where we find excellent agreement with analytical results. In addition, bulk excitations observed in the experiment are discussed.